The Use and Abuse of Cinema by Rentschler Eric;

Author:Rentschler, Eric;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 13.5 Dreske (Axel Bauer) and his comrades behold the offscreen Franz and are none too pleased by what they see and hear (Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1980).

FIGURE 13.6 His image refracted and shattered, Franz (Günter Lamprecht) digs into his memory and sings the famous tune about a fallen comrade.

Franz submits to the repeated call for a song and starts to sing, “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden,” a performance that Fassbinder stages with great precision and care. He links the spectacle to an earlier scene, the moment where a confused and just-released Franz stood in a courtyard and sang “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”), linking two moments of crisis in which the ex-soldier takes recourse to familiar tunes and the body of experience they constitute. The period Franz spent in Tegel, four years, parallels the duration of World War I. The time behind bars and at the front was one of affective relationships with other men, male bonds with a strong emotional, indeed heterosocial, dimension. The song reflects on the power of these attachments just as Fassbinder’s mise-en-scène accentuates the undeniable element of unrequited love in Franz’s relationship to his former comrades, whose collective response resembles the jealousy of a jilted lover. In repeated cuts to the group at the other table and its hostile silence, Fassbinder stresses the volatile atmosphere, unmediated, for the moment at least, by Max’s benevolent gaze. Franz’s recitation is a private recollection linked both to a war experience as well as a previous moment of trouble. The relatively long takes show Franz singing almost to himself; he is framed in a way that doubles his image, suggesting a shadow of the past and how it haunts his present person. Tegel and World War I have left their marks on Franz and likewise relate to the reality Dreske and his chums want to change.

Escalating a volatile situation, Franz lets out all stops and taunts the group with the openly chauvinistic “Die Wacht am Rhein,” almost provoking the fight he has so studiously sought to avoid. As the sequence reaches a conclusion, the music box in the bar (without apparent cause) starts playing the “Deutschlandslied,” yet another instance in which a song reflects on the larger context of an embattled postwar republic, as well as reflects the filmmaker’s desire to position the viewer as an active participant in this exploration of the past. Fassbinder does this, on one level, by constantly shifting between the private and the public, moving back and forth between personal destinies and historical determinants, always bearing in mind the retrospective advantage of the present-day spectator. On another level, he irritates the spectator by forcing an identification, at least in part, with a politically incorrect position, aligning our sympathies in the scene with a purveyor of the Nazi Party organ, creating a tension between our investment in the story and our knowledge of the subsequent course of the history from which it emanates. This is hard to swallow. Like the sandwich in Franz’s anecdote, the scene does not go down easily; in fact, it keeps on coming up.

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